How Can I Monitor Brand Mentions in Perplexity AI? (Step-by-Step Guide)

You're reviewing your marketing analytics when a colleague mentions they asked Perplexity about your product category—and your brand wasn't in the answer. Or maybe you discovered the opposite: Perplexity is citing your content, but you had no idea until someone stumbled across it.

Either way, the same question hits: How do I know when Perplexity mentions my brand?

It's the kind of question that didn't exist two years ago. Now it's one of the most important visibility questions for any brand competing in search. This guide walks you through exactly how to monitor your brand mentions in Perplexity AI—from manual methods you can start today to automated approaches that scale. We'll cover what works, what doesn't, and what to do once you know where you stand.

What Is Perplexity AI? (And Why Your Customers Are Already Using It)

If you're not fully familiar with Perplexity yet, here's the quick version: it's an AI-powered search engine that answers questions conversationally while citing its sources directly in the response. Unlike ChatGPT's default mode, Perplexity shows exactly where its information comes from with clickable links.

Think of it as a research assistant that reads the web for you and summarizes the answer—with receipts.

Launched in 2022, Perplexity has grown rapidly. As of late 2025, the platform processes over 780 million queries per month and has more than 22 million monthly active users. It holds roughly 6% of the AI search market, making it the third-largest player behind ChatGPT and Gemini.

Figure 1 : Perplexity's rapid growth—3x more queries and 2x more users in a single year—means more of the potential customers are researching products and services on a platform most brands aren't tracking.

More importantly, Perplexity users tend to have high intent. They're researching products, comparing services, and making decisions. When someone asks "what's the best project management software for remote teams," the brands that get cited in that answer gain visibility at a critical moment in the buyer journey. The brands that don't get mentioned? Invisible.

How People Realize Perplexity Is Mentioning (or Ignoring) Their Brand

Most brands discover their Perplexity visibility by accident.

Maybe a customer mentions they found you through Perplexity. Or a team member tests a few prompts and notices your competitor shows up but you don't. Sometimes it's worse when you discover Perplexity is mentioning your brand but with outdated or inaccurate information.

In early analyses of AI answers, we regularly see brands absent from Perplexity responses for their own category queries even when they hold top Google rankings for those same terms.

The discovery usually triggers a cascade of questions:

• How often are we being mentioned?

• What prompts trigger our brand?

• What exactly is Perplexity saying about us?

• Are our competitors getting mentioned more?

• Which source is Perplexity using when it talks about our category?

If you've found yourself asking these questions, you're not alone. The gap between "we should probably be tracking this" and "we have a system for tracking this" is where most brands are stuck right now.

Figure 2: A typical Perplexity response to "best electric cars 2026" — notice how specific brands are mentioned and sources are cited directly in the answer.

Figure 3: Perplexity often structures answers with tables, citing sources for each recommendation. If your brand isn't in this table, you're invisible at a key decision moment.

Why Perplexity Matters (And Why It's Different from ChatGPT)

You might be wondering: if I'm already thinking about ChatGPT visibility, why does Perplexity need its own strategy?

Three reasons:

Perplexity is citation-first. Every answer includes explicit source links, displayed prominently in the response. This transparency means you can see exactly which websites Perplexity trusts for any given topic. When your site gets cited, users see it directly. When it doesn't, you know you're being passed over.

Different users, different intent. Perplexity attracts a research-oriented audience. These aren't casual chatbot conversations—they're people actively looking for information to make decisions. The platform is particularly popular among Gen Z users for research tasks, and it's increasingly being adopted by professionals for work-related queries.

Different ranking logic. Perplexity uses real-time web search (retrieval-augmented generation) and has its own algorithm for selecting trustworthy sources. The sites that rank well in Google don't automatically get cited in Perplexity. The platforms draws heavily from certain types of sources—particularly Reddit, Wikipedia, review sites, and authoritative industry publications—in ways that differ from traditional search.

Optimizing for ChatGPT and optimizing for Perplexity require different approaches. And you can't optimize what you're not measuring.

The Real Challenge: Why Monitoring Perplexity Is Hard Today

Here's the problem: Perplexity doesn't offer a brand monitoring API or analytics dashboard for publishers. There's no equivalent to Google Search Console where you can log in and see your citation data.

This creates several challenges:

No native tracking. Perplexity doesn't tell you when you've been cited. You have to find out yourself.

Answers vary. The same question asked twice might cite different sources. Perplexity's answers change based on timing, phrasing, and the real-time web results it retrieves.

No historical data. Unless you're actively monitoring, you have no record of past visibility. If your competitor was dominating Perplexity mentions last month, and you weren't tracking it, that insight is gone.

Prompts are infinite. Unlike traditional keywords, where you can track a defined set, the questions people ask AI are conversational and varied. Tracking "project management software" doesn't capture "what tools help remote teams stay organized" or "best way to manage tasks across time zones."

This is why most brands are either not tracking Perplexity at all, or doing it manually on an ad-hoc basis.

Manual Method: How to Systematically Check Perplexity for Your Brand

Let's start with what you can do today without any tools.

Figure 4 : The Perplexity monitoring workflow: define your queries, run checks, document what you find, identify visibility gaps, take action to improve, and repeat regularly.

Step 1: Define Your Query Set

Create a list of questions your target audience actually asks. Focus on three categories:

Brand queries:

• "[Your brand name] reviews"

• "Is [your brand] good?"

• "[Your brand] vs [competitor]"

Category queries:

• "Best [your category] tools"

• "Top [your category] software for [use case]"

• "What is [your category]?"

Problem queries:

• Questions that describe the problem your product solves

• "How do I [achieve outcome your product enables]?"

Start with 10-20 queries. Quality matters more than quantity at this stage.

Step 2: Run the Queries in Perplexity

Go to perplexity.ai and enter each query. For each result, document:

• Were you mentioned? Did your brand name appear in the answer text?

• Were you cited? Did Perplexity include a link to your website in the sources?

• What context? Were you featured prominently, listed among alternatives, or mentioned briefly?

• Who else was mentioned? Which competitors appeared?

• What sources were cited? Note the domains Perplexity used to generate the answer.

Step 3: Record Everything

Create a simple spreadsheet with columns for:

• Query

• Date checked

• Brand mentioned (yes/no)

• Cited with link (yes/no)

• Position in answer (primary recommendation / among options / brief mention)

• Competitors mentioned

• Sources cited

• Notes

Step 4: Establish a Cadence

Check your queries on a regular schedule—weekly or bi-weekly at minimum. Perplexity's answers change over time as it indexes new content and adjusts its algorithms.

What You'll Learn from Manual Tracking

Even basic manual tracking reveals valuable insights:

• Which competitors consistently appear in your category

• Which types of sources Perplexity trusts (you might discover it heavily cites certain review sites or publications)

• How your content is being represented (accurately? positively? at all?)

• Gaps where you should be mentioned but aren't

This method works. It's also slow, inconsistent, and doesn't scale.

Why Manual Tracking Breaks at Scale

Figure 5: Manual monitoring has six key limitations: it's time-consuming, can't cover all query variations, produces inconsistent results between team members, offers no real-time alerts, introduces human bias, and makes it difficult to track trends over time without historical data.

Manual monitoring is a reasonable starting point, but it has real limitations:

Time. Checking 20 queries weekly takes 1-2 hours. Checking 100+ queries across multiple markets? That becomes a significant ongoing time investment.

Inconsistency. Different team members might check different queries at different times. Results are hard to compare. Trends are hard to spot.

Bias. You'll naturally gravitate toward checking queries where you expect to show up. The queries where you're invisible—and where competitors are winning—are easy to miss.

Missed prompts. Your 50-query list can't capture the thousands of variations that real users type. Manual tracking gives you samples, not coverage.

No alerts. If a competitor launches a new campaign and suddenly dominates your category queries, you won't know until your next manual check.

No historical comparison. Manual spreadsheets get messy over time. Spotting trends across months of data requires significant effort.

For brands serious about AI visibility, manual tracking is the starting point, not the strategy.

Automated Method: How Tools Monitor Perplexity Brand Mentions

Automated AI visibility tools address the limitations of manual tracking by running your queries programmatically and tracking results over time.

Here's what automated monitoring typically provides:

Continuous tracking. Tools run your queries on a set schedule (daily, weekly) without manual effort. You get consistent data points for trend analysis.

Scale. Track hundreds or thousands of query variations across your category. Capture long-tail questions you'd never check manually.

Historical data. See how your visibility has changed over time. Identify when competitors gained ground. Spot the impact of your optimization efforts.

Competitor benchmarking. Track your share of voice against specific competitors across your query set.

Source analysis. See which domains Perplexity relies on for your category. This reveals where to focus PR and content efforts.

Alerts. Get notified when your visibility changes significantly—up or down.

How Mentionary Monitors Perplexity

Mentionary tracks your brand's presence across AI answer engines, including Perplexity, ChatGPT, Gemini, and others from a single dashboard.

For Perplexity specifically, Mentionary:

• Runs your defined queries against Perplexity on a regular cadence

• Captures whether your brand is mentioned in the answer text

• Records whether your website is cited in the sources

• Tracks which competitors appear alongside you (or instead of you)

• Logs the third-party sources Perplexity cites when discussing your category

• Measures your share of voice over time

• Alerts you to significant visibility changes

The goal isn't just knowing whether you're mentioned—it's understanding why you are or aren't, and what to do about it.

Several other tools in the market also offer Perplexity tracking, Mentionary is a great choise due to many reasons including it’s features such as intelligent user prompt suggestions, tracking of sources, and many more. The key is choosing a solution that fits your scale, provides the metrics you need, and integrates with your existing workflow. We reccommend Mentionary, as it suits different scales including startups to Fortune 500 brands.

What to Do When You Find Mentions: The Accuracy and Trust Audit

Knowing you're mentioned is step one. Step two is evaluating how you're mentioned.

Not all mentions are good mentions. Perplexity might cite your brand with:

• Outdated information (old pricing, discontinued features, previous positioning)

• Inaccurate claims (wrong stats, misattributed quotes, confused product details)

• Negative framing (mentioned as an also-ran, criticized relative to competitors)

• Wrong context (associated with use cases you don't serve, or markets you're not in)

When you find a mention, run a quick accuracy audit:

Is the information current? Check if Perplexity is pulling from your most recent content or older pages.

Is it factually correct? Verify any statistics, claims, or feature descriptions.

Is the framing fair? Even accurate information can be positioned negatively. Note the context.

What source is Perplexity using? If it's citing a third-party review or article, that source may be where the problem originates.

For inaccuracies, the fix usually isn't confronting Perplexity directly (they're aggregating sources, not writing original content). The fix is updating the underlying sources—your own website, your profiles on third-party sites, and the publications that write about your category.

How to Improve Your Perplexity Visibility Based on Findings

Once you're tracking your visibility and auditing your mentions, you can start improving.

Content Optimization for Perplexity Citations

Perplexity favors content that:

Answers questions directly. Structure your content with clear questions and concise answers. Use H2s that match how people phrase queries.

Provides verifiable facts. Include specific data points, statistics, and claims that Perplexity can cite with confidence. Primary research and original data are particularly valuable.

Demonstrates expertise. E-E-A-T signals matter. Author bios, credentials, publication dates, and update history all influence trust.

Is technically accessible. Make sure your site is crawlable, loads quickly, uses proper metadata, and implements relevant schema markup (FAQ, HowTo, Product schemas).

Is current. Perplexity favors fresh content. Regularly update your cornerstone pages.

Build Authority Through Third-Party Sources

Perplexity heavily weights third-party sources. Your own site matters, but what others say about you often matters more.

Focus on:

• Industry publications that cover your category

• Review sites relevant to your market (G2, Capterra, TrustRadius for B2B; category-specific sites for consumer products)

• Expert roundups and "best of" lists

• Community discussions (Reddit, industry forums, Quora)

• Podcast appearances and interviews that get transcribed

When authoritative third parties mention your brand positively, Perplexity is more likely to cite those sources and, by extension, surface your brand.

Entity and Structured Data

Help AI systems understand your brand as an entity:

• Maintain consistent NAP (name, address, phone) data across the web

• Claim and optimize your knowledge panel in Google

• Use schema markup to clarify your brand, products, and organizational structure

• Build a Wikipedia presence if your brand meets notability requirements

Monitor, Adjust, Repeat

AI visibility optimization is iterative. Changes take time to reflect in Perplexity's results. Keep tracking to see what's working and adjust your approach based on data, not guesses.

Perplexity vs. ChatGPT vs. Gemini: Monitoring Differences That Matter

If you're thinking about AI visibility holistically, here's how monitoring differs across the major platforms:

Table 1 : How monitoring differs across AI platforms — each engine handles citations, web search, and brand visibility differently, requiring tailored tracking approaches.

Each platform has different strengths, different user bases, and different optimization requirements. A comprehensive AI visibility strategy monitors all of them, but recognizes that tactics differ by platform.

Start Tracking Today

Perplexity isn't the future of search—it's the present for millions of users already. Every day you're not monitoring is a day you're invisible to a growing audience of high-intent researchers.

Here's how to start:

This week: Create your initial query list (10-20 questions) and run manual checks. Document what you find.

This month: Establish a consistent monitoring cadence. Identify your biggest visibility gaps.

Ongoing: Evaluate automated tools that can scale your monitoring and provide trend data. Build a systematic approach to improving your citations based on what you learn.

The brands that understand their AI visibility today will dominate these channels tomorrow. The first step is simply knowing where you stand.

Ready to track your brand's visibility across Perplexity and other AI answer engines? See how Mentionary can help you monitor, analyze, and improve your AI search presence.